Stripe Joins Square In Taking Payments International

There's a Canadian flag hanging in the window of Stripe, a hot
online-payments startup which just raised $20 million from
Sequoia
Capital and other investors.

That's because, Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison told Business
Insider, he's taking the business international—expanding
first to Canada, then other countries.

Stripe's not the only payments startup with global ambitions.
This week at the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho,
Square CEO
Jack
Dorsey
reiterated the company's plans for international expansion.
Square
hiredPayPal
veteran Alyssa Cutright as a vice president for international
earlier this year. The company also mentioned an international
push as a reason for hiring former
Goldman analyst Sarah Friar as its CFO.

Though Stripe and Square are both ostensibly in the broad field
of electronic payments, they couldn't be more different in terms
of their products and customers.

Square serves small, local businesses which need to swipe
physical credit cards. Stripe's target market are other Internet
businesses which want to efficiently build in features to charge
customers for digital purchases or online subscriptions.

Sightglass Coffee, a café in San Francisco's SoMa district (in
which Dorsey is an investor) rings up lattes using a Square card
reader and an iPad running
its Register software. Exec, a marketplace which lets you call
for jack-of-all-trades to perform tasks for you, is a Stripe
customer.

But what Square and Stripe have in common is this: They are
high-profile Internet startups whose brands already have global
reach. So they need to head abroad to satisfy customers who don't
understand why their offerings are limited to American shores.